Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, a novel about a marriage which has split reviewers, has been named the best book of the year by Amazon.com.

Telling the story of glamorous couple Lotto and Mathilde, who fall in love and marry after just two weeks, Fates and Furies is the third novel from the award-winning Groff. Amazon called it “dazzling”, and placed it top of its list of the year’s best books, as chosen by its editorial team. The novel came in ahead of titles including Ta-Nehisi Coates’s second-placed letter to his son Between the World and Me, in which he takes on the topic of race in America, Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Purity, which was placed eighth by Amazon, and Paula Hawkins’s thriller The Girl on the Train, which was 10th.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff review - a marriage seen from two sides

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Amazon’s editorial director of books and Kindle Sarah Nelson described Groff’s language as “electric” and praised her “ingenious plotting … fascinating and unlike anything I’ve read in years”. The book “is a novel about a marriage from two different points of view, but it’s no linear ‘he said, she said’,” said Nelson. “Our editors adored it.”

Reviewers were not as convinced. While the New York Times found Groff to be a “writer of rare gifts”, and Fates and Furies “an unabashedly ambitious novel that delivers – with comedy, tragedy, well-deployed erudition and unmistakable glimmers of brilliance throughout”, the Guardian’s Susanna Rustin described the book as a “strange mashup of literary and pulp fiction”.

“The level of dishonesty in an ostensibly solid marriage is, to me, impossible to believe in,” wrote Rustin, adding: “The style, combining hard-boiled four-word sentences with abstract musings, jarred.” In the Observer, Hannah Beckerman wrote that it “struggles to engage with its characters” and “the story lacks the psychological insight and rounded character portrayals that might have transformed it from an intellectually interesting novel to an outstanding one”.